Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Smoking is bad for you and it would be best that people did not smoke and that we did things to discourage them from smoking but punishing people financially for an addiction is not the way forward and is overwhelmingly a regressive form of taxation in that it disproportionately hits the less well-off. I also strongly doubt the Government will, certainly through this mechanism, get to a tobacco-free Ireland, but - and this is happening on a widespread basis already - those who continue to smoke will source cigarettes and tobacco illegally and potentially endanger their health to a greater degree because they will be buying products that are not properly regulated and are often mixed with dangerous substances or mislabelled as to what is really in them, pretending to be one product when they are something quite different in many cases. Therefore, I do not think this is the right approach. As I said, it ends up financially punishing in a pretty significant way people, who often are older or are on lower incomes, for an addiction they find difficult to shake.

It is worth commenting in that regard that if we are really serious about public health, why do we not resource our public health teams, which do things like public health education? They do not just deal with Covid pandemics. They are chronically understaffed and under-resourced all across the country. Why not give them the staffing and the resources necessary to wage a positive public health education campaign? That would be a far more effective and sensible way to try to encourage people, particularly young people, not to smoke. There are some recent reports that smoking levels among our younger population are beginning to pick up again despite the prices. There is no doubt they went down but there is some evidence they are starting to rise again. I do not support the measure. I think I will probably be fairly alone in making that point.

I will not make anything like a lengthy point on the other matter, which strays a bit from the Financial Resolutions. I will just say, briefly, that something that is not mentioned but should be mentioned is that the transport budget is down in the Estimates books. Being the nerd I am, I look at the Estimate books, and expenditure on transport, including public transport, is down in budget 2022. When the Government piles on carbon tax increases based on decisions made in previous budgets, it does so in the context of not giving the massive injection of investment in building public transport capacity that would give people a choice. It is very retrograde to do that because, again, it punishes people for something that is not really in their control. It is the lack of alternatives to the car that is the problem, so just punishing people with carbon taxes while reducing the amount of money that goes into transport and into public transport in particular, to my mind reeks of double standards and hypocrisy.

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